time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of
their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own
personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical
representation of the highest identity between themselves and their
time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:
... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,
L'ardeur
Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,
L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;
C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor
Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6]
They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first
adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the
rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from
which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things.
They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat
of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and
obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must
learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony
that was lost between the world and the work of art.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[2] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
[3] 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[4] 'L'En-Avant' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[5] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_).
[6] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
THE NEW PATHOS
Lassé des mots, lassé des livres.
. . . . . . . . .
Je cherche, en ma fierté,
L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre.
É.V., 'L'Action.'
The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or
print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry
won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate
entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because
it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to
produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the
first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an
invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy;
a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the
others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in
expectation--somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered
them together in front of blind Homer--they waited, watched, listened,
surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they
resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished
and presented for approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into
shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of
creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the
hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.
Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was
invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in
after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with;
all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their
words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited;
that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their
words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust--this vast and
mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and
perhaps not lesser effect--dialogue, that standing face to face with the
multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the
public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more
and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the
harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and
less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from
speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is
only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd,
by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of
the hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with
his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every
listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces
something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not
yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no
longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new
and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to
speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important,
irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none
but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that
the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of
passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry--the
last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music--he sought to
complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his
poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel;
illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and
more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of
inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other
men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that
period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into
being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified
more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into
bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed
side by side with the real language; it was only the last
intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion,
by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication,
a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality,
language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could
remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day
has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who
live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.
Nevertheless in our own days there seem to be signs of a return to this
primitive close contact between the poet and his audience; a new pathos
is at its birth. The stage was the first bridge between the poet and the
multitude. But here the actor was still the intermediary of the spoken
word; the purely lyrical emotion was not an aim in itself, but only, for
three or four hours, a help in the illusion. However, the time of the
isolation of the poet from the crowd, which was formerly rendered
necessary by the great distances between nation and nation, seems now to
have been overcome by the shortening of space and by the
industrialisation of cities. To-day poets once again recite their verse
in lecture-halls, in the popular universities of America; nay, in
churches Walt Whitman's lines ring out into the American consciousness,
and what used to be created only by the seething seconds of political
crises--one might instance Petöfi declaiming his national anthem 'Talpra
Magyar' from the steps of the university to the revolutionary
crowd--occurs almost every day. Now again as of old the lyric poet seems
entitled to be, if not the intellectual leader of the time, at least he
who must excite and quell the passions of the time; the rhapsodist who
hails, kindles, and fans that holy fire, energy. The world seems to be
waiting for Him who shall concentrate all life in a flash of lightning
to light up all the deeps of darkness:
Il monte--et l'on croirait que le monde l'attend,
Si large est la clameur des cœurs battant
À l'unisson de ses paroles souveraines.
Il est effroi, danger, affre, fureur et haine;
Il est ordre, silence, amour et volonté;
Il scelle en lui toutes les violences lyriques.[1]
Certainly the poem which would speak to the multitude must be different
to the kind of poem that pleased our fathers. Above all, it must itself
be a will, an aim, an energy, an evocation. All the technical
excellence, the sweet music, the craft of vibrating rhythms, suppleness
and flexibility of language, must, in the new poem, no longer be an aim
in themselves, but only a means to kindle enthusiasm. Such a poem must
no longer be a sentimental dialogue between a hermit and some other
hermit, a stranger somewhere far away; it must no longer be the short,
hurriedly trembling voice which is silenced ere the word's flame has
blazed up in it; no, this new poem must be strongly exulting, richly
inspired, with a far horizon for its goal, and rushing on with
irresistible impetuosity. It is not written for gentle moods, but for
loud, resonant words. He who would quell the crowd must have the rhythm
of their own new and restless life in him; he who speaks to the crowd
must be inspired by the new pathos. And this new pathos, this 'pathos
which most of all accepts the world as it is' (in Nietzsche's sense),
is, above all, zest, is the strength and the will to create ecstasy.
This poem must not be sensitive and woebegone; it must not express a
personal grief that seeks to enlist the sympathies of others; no, it
must be inspired by a fulness of joy, by the will to create from joy
itself passion that cannot be held down. Only great feelings bear the
message to the crowd; small feelings, which can only in silence, as in
motionless air, rise above the ground, are dashed down again. _The new
pathos must contain the will, not to set souls in vibration, not to
provide a delicate, æsthetic sense of pleasure, but to fire to a deed._
It must carry the hearer along with it; it must once again collect in
itself the scattered forces of the poet of old time; it must in the poet
recreate, for an hour, the demagogue, the musician, the actor, the
orator; it must snatch the word again off the paper into the air; it
must carefully entrust feeling as a secret treasure to the individual;
it must hurl this treasure into the surf of a multitude. Poems with such
a new pathos cannot be created by feeble, passive men, whose mood can be
changed at any minute by the world around them, but only by fighting
natures, who are governed by an idea, by the thought of a duty; who seek
to force their feeling on others; who elevate their inspiration to the
inspiration of the whole world.
This new lyric pathos is in our days growing lustily into life again.
For centuries rhetoricians have been mocked at. The change of estimation
in Schiller's case from worship to sufferance is a lasting proof. And
let us remember that Nietzsche, the only German who in recent years has
influenced the world, was only able to do so by creating a new
rhetorical style--'I am the inventor of the dithyramb'--only by making
his _Zarathustra_ a preacher's book which insistently requires a loud,
resonant voice. In France it was Victor Hugo who first recognised the
necessity of direct address. But he, who, as it happens, stands on that
narrowest boundary-line which separates genius from talent, he of whom
one can say that he was either the least of the eternal, monumental
poets or the greatest of the minor, the derivative poets, he confined
himself to France, he never thought of any but the French nation--as
Walt Whitman never thought of any but the American nation--and, above
all, he had not the high place whence to speak to his nation. He would
have been greater if he had really had the tribune whence his thunder
and lightning might have reached the multitude, instead of being always
only a sinister grumbling from the background of exile. Of all the
hundred volumes of his work perhaps nothing will remain except that
commanding gesture of an orator which Rodin has perpetuated in his
statue, and which is nothing else than the will to move to passion. He
has created this will to pathos, but not the pathos itself; still, even
the effort is a great and memorable achievement.
Victor Hugo's inheritance, which was ill administered by chatterers and
chauvinists, by Déroulède and such poets with their big drums and their
trumpet-flourishes, has been taken over in France by Verhaeren. And he
is the first whose voice again reaches the crowd, the first French
realisation of a pathos which has absolutely the effect of art and
poetry. He more than any other, he whose deepest delight it is to quell
a grandiose resistance, he the _évocateur prodigieux_, as Bersaucourt[2]
has called him, was entitled to the mastery of the living word. Whenever
I read a poem by Verhaeren, I am time after time astonished to find
myself, when I have begun by reading it to myself, suddenly forced to
read the words aloud; surprised to find myself reading them louder and
louder; surprised to find in my hand, in my whole body, the urgent need
awakening of the gesture that hails and kindles an audience. For so
strong is the passionateness of the original feeling, the inner cry and
appeal in the words, that it forces its way through the reproduction,
rings out loudly even from the dead letters. _All the great poems of
Verhaeren are filled with the yearning to be spoken aloud, vehemently,
in the zest and glow of passion_. If they are recited softly, they seem
to be quite without melody; if they are read calmly and stolidly, they
often seem hard, uneven, and abrupt. Many images recur with a certain
regularity, many adjectives are repeated as petrified ideas--the trick
of an orator who emphasises what is important by standing
expressions--but the moment the poem is read aloud it is all alive
again, the repetitions are suddenly revealed as superb instances of
excitement reaching its mark, the recurring images take their place as
regular milestones along a road rushing along wildly to the infinite.
Verhaeren's poetry is the communication of an ecstasy, communication not
in the sense of a secret to an individual, but of fire cast to kindle a
crowd. His poems never seem to be quite completed, but to have been
first created while being read, just as every good and fiery speech
gives the impression of being improvised; they are always the unfolding
of a state, a passionate analysis that acts like a discovery. They are
moving, not harmonious. Just as an orator does not shock his audience at
the very first with the conclusion of his reasoning, but pays out the
chain of his arguments slowly and logically, Verhaeren builds his poems
from visions, first in repose, then in the excitement that intensifies,
and then with burning horizons foaming over more and more wildly in
images. And these images again are rhetorical; they are not similes
which can only be understood in their totality by the roundabout way of
reflection; they are glaring flashes of lightning. A poem that would
move those who hear it has need of metaphors which not only hit the mark
of feeling, but which hit it immediately with deadly effect. They must
be glaring, because they have to force the whole feeling in the
expression of one second as quick as lightning. In this way the pathetic
poem produces a new form of sensuous expression, and in this way too it
creates itself a new rhythm of intensification. First of all, with the
lightnings of his metaphors Verhaeren illuminates the vast landscape of
visions; then, by a certain monotony of rhythm, he intensifies the
astonishment and excitement to the highest ecstasy. Repeatedly, at the
breathing-spaces of his great poems, you think you have reached the
summit, only to be whipped to a higher leap, to a higher outlook. 'Il
faut en tes élans te dépasser sans cesse';[3] this, his moral
commandment, is for him the highest poetical law as well. The deepest
will of his pathetic poem is to whip up, to set running, to snatch his
hearer along with him. 'Dites!' this summons which is like a gesture,
the urgent 'encore, encore!' are appeals which in his poems are
petrified into cries, just as every horseman has certain words to lure
the last strength from his horse. _Such words are nothing but transposed
oratorical gestures_. The hollow 'oh!' is the gesture of appeal; the
short 'qu'importe!' the gesture as of one who casts away a burden grown
too heavy; the slow, curving, far-sweeping 'immensément' is the heaping
up of all infinity. These poems are lashed into fever heat. For not only
do they themselves seek to fly like those other, the harmonious, the
really lyric poems, which with wings outspread seem to hover near the
clouds, they also seek to snatch up by force the whole heavy mass of the
audience. This is the explanation of the constant repetitions in the
poems, which are often very long, as though some last doubter were yet
to be convinced, as though fire were to be darted into the blood of some
last one yet immune. Everything strives forwards, forwards, dragging the
resister along with ecstatic power.
And here are seen the dangers of pathos. The first danger, that into
which, for instance, Victor Hugo fell, was the emptiness, the hollowness
of the feeling, the covering over of a void by a mighty gesture;
enthusiasm resulting from a deliberate method, and not forced by inner
feeling. Empty phrasing is and remains the first danger of the pathetic
poem. The triteness of words 'plus sonores que solides'[4] is the
second. Here, however, in this new pathos, there is another and a new
peril, that of the over-heating of feeling, that of excessive, unhealthy
exaltation, which must then of necessity yield to exhaustion. No man can
be in a constant fever of excitement, in an unremitting state of
exaltation. And in these poems there is the will to unceasing ecstasy.
By the pathos, too, the purely lyrical values of the poem often fall
into danger. The will to be clear often forces the poet to a triteness
of wording; the terseness necessitates frequent repetition; the impulse
to build up an organic ecstasy often leads to excessive length. Owing to
its glaring, clear colours the language loses that mystical element of
lyric verse--the incommensurable, as Goethe called it--that magic hint
of a secret thing fleeing from the crowd and the light of day. But at
the same time this pathos signifies an immense enrichment of lyric
resources, a transvaluation of the word, by the very fact that it is not
exclusively intended for print but for declamation as well. The pathetic
poem is not, like the lyric poem, a crystallised impression; it is not
at the same time question and answer to itself; it is the expectation of
an answer. The great pathos, therefore, grows with success, and
involuntarily mingles in the poem the craving and the answer of the
poet's time. The voice of the poet is always as strong as the call that
goes out to him. Verhaeren found this new pathos in the course of his
development, because he no longer felt the voice of the crowd, of
cities, and of all the new things as a hindrance to his lyric poetry,
but as a challenge, as a rhetorical exhortation. And the more the world
around us becomes ponderous, grandiose, and passionate--the more it
becomes heroic in the concentration of its strength (heroic in that new
strength that Emerson preached)--so much the more, too, must lyric
poetry in the new sense, perhaps in Verhaeren's sense, be pathetic.
Gigantic impressions cannot be forced into petty impressions; vast
conceptions cannot be split up into mean fragments; a loud appeal needs
a loud answer. All art is more dependent than we are aware on its epoch.
The same secret dependence between demand and production seems to exist
in the sphere of art as exists in commerce. Laws that escape our
knowledge and cannot be prisoned in formulae can sometimes be glimpsed,
hazy as a presentiment, in fugitive intuition.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Le Tribun' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[2] Albert de Bersaucourt, _Conférence sur Emile Verhaeren._
[3] 'L'Impossible' (_Les Forces Tumultueuses_).
[4] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren._
VERHAEREN'S POETIC METHOD
Je suis celle des surprises fécondes.
É.V., 'Celle des Voyages.'
A real poem must not exhibit an artificial structure of parts, a
mechanism; it must, like man himself, be organic, an indissoluble union
of soul and body. It must have a living body of flesh, the substance of
the word, the colour of the metaphors, the mechanism of the motion, the
skeleton of the thought; but over and above all that it must possess
that inexpressible something, the soul, which alone makes it organic;
the breath, the rhythm, that inseparable essence which is no longer
perceptible to intelligence, but only to feeling. It is not first in
this transcendental element, however, that the poet's personality is
revealed: the poetry of a great poet must be characteristic in its very
physis, in its very material. Side by side with that magic vibration,
that intangible element of feeling, the materiality too, the weaving of
the word, that net of expression in which the fugitive feeling is caught
in the waters of the hidden life and lifted into the light, these too
must be alone of their kind if they are to characterise the poet's race,
environment, and personality. This purely material organism of the poet
too is, like every living thing, subject to growth, to the change of
maturity and age. The structure of the poem, like every human face, must
gradually, in the revolution of the years, work its way to character
from the shifting features of childhood and the indistinctness of the
general type, must in its sensuous externals, in the physiognomy of the
material, show all psychic changes to the last acquisition of
personality. In a real poet the technical aspect, the handicraft, the
external element has a development that runs parallel to the
intellectual and poetic contents. In form, too, the poem must at first
represent a tradition, something that has been taken over; only in the
revolt of youth will it achieve a personal form, and this itself will
later, as it gradually grows cold and petrifies, represent an immutable
type.
Verhaeren's poetry has its evolution and its history in this purely
formal sense. Even this poetry of Verhaeren's, which to-day looms so
immensely isolated and so victoriously characteristic in French
literature that a connoisseur can, without a shadow of doubt, recognise
the creator from a single stanza, has grown from a tradition, is the
climax of a certain culture, and is at the same time related to a
contemporary movement. When Verhaeren began to write, Victor Hugo, the
crowned king of French lyric poetry, was dead; Baudelaire was forgotten;
Paul Verlaine was still almost unknown. Victor Hugo's heirs, who
divided his kingdom as once the diadochi divided the kingdom of
Alexander the Great, were only able to preserve the trappings of the
glory gone, and the grandiloquence of their words contrasted ill with
their thin voices and artificial feelings. Against this circle, against
François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Théodore de Banville and the rest of
them, rose up a new school of young men who called themselves 'decadents
and symbolists.' Here I must frankly admit that I am really unable to
explain this idea, perhaps for the very reason that I have read so many
varying definitions of it. The only thing that is certain is, that at
that time a group of young writers rose up in concert against a
tradition, and, in the most diverse experiments, sought a new lyrical
expression. What this new thing consisted in would be hard to say. The
truth is perhaps that all these poets were not French; that each of them
brought some new element from his own country, his own race, his own
past; that none of them felt that respect for the French tradition which
was in the blood of the native poets as an inward barrier, and thus were
able unconsciously to get nearer to their own artistic instinct. One
only needs to look at the names, which often at the first glance betray
the foreigner, the Americans Vielé-Griffin and Stuart Merrill, the
Belgians Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, and Mockel, or which, as in the case of
Jean Moréas, cover a complicated Greek name with a French pseudonym.
The only indisputable exploit of this group really was that about 1885
they quickened the pace of French lyric poetry with a new unrest.
Mallarmé plunged his verses into a secret darkness of symbols, until the
words with their subterranean meaning almost became unintelligible,
while Verlaine gave his lines the dream-rapt lightsomeness of a music
never heard before. Gustave Kalm and Jules Laforgue were the first who
did away, the one with rhyme and the other with the Alexandrine, and
introduced the apparent irregularities of the _vers libre._ Each one did
his best on his own account to find something new, and all of them had
in common the same fiery eagerness to attack the idols of a derivative
poetry, the same ardent longing for a new form of expression. True,
their talent was soon choked up with sand, but that was because they
over-estimated the technical side of the innovations they introduced and
spent themselves in the investigation of theories, instead of developing
their own personalities. As time went on their paths diverged widely.
Many of them foundered in the sea of journalism; others are still, after
a lapse of twenty years, walking round in a circle in the footsteps of
their youth; and of the symbolists and decadents nothing is left but a
page or so of literary history, a faded sign-board marking an empty
shop. Verhaeren too was classed with them, although in my view he was
never essentially influenced by this school. A man of such sturdy
originality could not be more than stimulated by others, could not be
more than confirmed in his natural tendency to revolt. His attitude with
regard to the _vers libre_ was by no means due to this influence. For it
was not by suggestion from others, not by the instinct of imitation, but
by inward necessity, that he discovered his new form. It was not the
example of others that freed him from the fetters of tradition; he was
forced to free himself from them of his own accord. This inner
compulsion is alone of importance; for it is a matter of complete
indifference whether a poet writes by chance in regular verse or in
_vers libres_; the phenomenon can only be significant when a poet is of
necessity and by inner pressure forced to free himself from tradition
and to achieve a personal form.
It was as a Parnassian that Verhaeren began. His first poetical
attempts, which he has never published, the verses he wrote at school
and in his first years at the university, showed him hypnotised by the
style of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. And even in the first two books he
published, in _Les Flamandes_ and _Les Moines_, there is not a single
poem in which Verhaeren has gone beyond his models. His poem is indeed
somewhat more mobile than the strict pattern of school exercises; it
already shows slight traces of the cracks which at a later day will
break the vessel to pieces. But this hint of insubordination was at
that time necessitated more by the harshness and rebelliousness of the
subject itself, by some stiffness or other in the turn of the phrase,
which can only be explained by the fact of the poet's alien race. Even a
foreigner can recognise that the verse is not rounded off, that the
rhythm is not balanced with the natural inevitable sense of form that a
man of Latin race would have, but that here a forceful will is with
difficulty constraining a barbaric temperament to harmony. Through his
French one can hear the massive language of his race, something of the
unwieldy strength we have in our old German ballads. And what his name
at the first glance betrayed--the foreigner--was to the finer ear of a
native easily perceptible from his French alone.
The farther Verhaeren proceeded in his development--the nearer he got to
his real nature--the more the inheritance of his race in him revolted
against the shackles of tradition--so much the more intensive became the
impression of the Teutonic element in his verse. After all, development
is in most cases nothing more than the awakening in us of our buried
past. The highest demand of the Parnassian school, _impassibilité,_ an
immovableness as of bronze, is the antithesis of his stormy temperament,
which drives him along to a wild rhythm, not to harmony. Deep, guttural
notes vibrate in his verses, and make the song of his vowels rough; the
angularity, the masculinity, abruptness, and hardness of his peasant's
nature peer through everywhere. In addition to this, there is now the
inner transformation. So long as Verhaeren's poetic tendency was merely
pictorial, one that calmly and without excitement aimed at painting the
passion of the Flemish people, the earnestness of monasteries, just so
long did the Alexandrine best serve to divide the rhythmic waves of his
inspiration and roll them along. But when his personal sympathy began to
confuse the inner indifference of his first work, his verse became
uneasy. The cracks in the Alexandrine became more and more perceptible;
greater and greater in the poet grew his impatience of it and his desire
to smash it. He is no longer satisfied with the _vers ternaire_, the
verse of the Romanticists with its two cæsuras dividing the line into
three parts of perfectly equal rhythm and weight; he takes the free
Alexandrine introduced by Victor Hugo and develops it still further,
makes it still more irregular. He gives the syllables a different
quantity, a different sonority; they no longer rest, they rock to and
fro. And gradually the earnest, immovable uniformity of accentuation is
changed into a more billowing, rhythmic fluidity. But ere long this
concession too becomes too trivial for him. A temperament so impetuous
as his will endure no outward fetter whatever. For it is not repose that
this fiery singer would describe, but his own excited state--the
quivering and vibrating of his emotion, his febrile unrest. His great
manifold feeling, which is nothing else than a modulated cry, cannot
storm itself out in regular verse; it needs unquiet gestures, motion,
freedom, the _vers libre_. The fact that at this time other poets in
France were using the free verse, the fact that it was at that
time--several dispute the priority--'invented' for poets, is of no
consequence to us here. Such contemporaneous incidences never express a
chance, but always a latent necessity. Free verse was nothing else than
the inevitable reflex action of modern feeling, the poetic breaking free
of the unrest which lay in the time. Whether or not Verhaeren at that
time had models is of no importance. What has been taken over can never
become organic, only what comes from personal experience is a real gain.
And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by
inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create
himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of
Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to
describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern
impressions--their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their
unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness
of their dimensions--it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier.
Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a
real crowd, noisily seething; they must not walk in step, like soldiers
on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in
the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of
the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they
must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot
be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive.
Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its
deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can
the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward
agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely
external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The
lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an
arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling.
They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if
haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours
plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';[1] they can dart up like a
falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,'
swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the
voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all
that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and
grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing by sudden
harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a
precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling
by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the
poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their
consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical
arrangement.
For this reason I should be tempted to call these poems with their vast
range _symphonic_ poems. They seem to have been conceived for an
orchestra. They are not, like the poetry of a past generation, chamber
music; they are not solitary violin _soli_; they are an inspired
blending of all instruments; they are graded in individual sections
which have a different _tempo_ and the pauses of the transitions. In
Verhaeren's poetry the lyric exceeds the bounds of its domain and
impinges on the dramatic and the epic. For his poem seeks not only to
describe a mood, like a purely lyrical poem, it describes at the same
time the birth of this mood. And this first part of the construction is
epic; it is descriptive; it leads up from a lowly beginning to a great
discharge of force. And, in the second place, the transitions are
dramatic, those bursts of temperament from section to section, those
precipitous falls and steep ascents which only at the end lead to a
harmonious solution. From a purely external point of view Verhaeren's
poem is more extensive, longer, of a greater range than any other
contemporary poetry; it shoots out farther beyond the limit of lyric
poetry; and, careless of the boundary-line of æsthetics, it derives
strength and nourishment from neighbouring domains. It comes nearer to
rhetoric, nearer to epic poetry, nearer to the drama, nearer to
philosophy than any other poetry of our day; it is more independent of
set rules than poetry had been hitherto. And independent of rules--or
obeying only a new inner rule--is Verhaeren's form. Now, since the page
no longer holds the fettered lines together in equal columns, the poet
can write out his wild, overflowing feelings in their own wild, boldly
curving lines. Verhaeren's poem at this time--and that which is achieved
in the years of maturity remains inalienable--has its own inner
architectonics. But it can hardly be compared to a piece of
architecture, a structure built with hands; it is rather like a
manifestation of nature. It is elementary like every feeling; it
discharges itself like a storm. First a vision moves up like a cloud;
more and more densely it compresses itself; more and more sultrily, more
and more oppressively it weighs on the feeling; higher and higher,
hotter and hotter grows the inner tension, until at last in the
lightning of the images, in the rolling of the rhythm, all the garnered
strength discharges itself rhythmically. The andante always grows to a
furioso; and only the last section shows again the clear, cleansed sky
of calm, in an intellectual synthesis of the state of chaos. This
structure of Verhaeren's poem is almost invariable. It may be seen, for
instance, in two parallel examples: in the poems 'La Foule' and 'Vers la
Mer' in the book _Les Visages de la Vie_. Both set in with an
adjuration, a vision. Here the crowd, its confusion, its strength; there
a sensitive picture of the morning sea whose transparent tones remind
one of Turner. Now the poet fires this still vision with his own
passionateness. You see the crowd moving more and more restlessly, the
waves surging more and more passionately; and ecstasy breaks out the
moment the poet surrenders himself to these things, places himself among
the crowd, sinks his feeling, his body in the sea. Then in the finale
bursts forth the great cry of identity, in the one case the yearning to
be all the crowd, in both that ecstatic gesture of the individual
yearning for infinity. The first picture, which was only sensuously
seen, grows at the end of the poem into a great ethic inspiration; from
the vision is unfolded an unconquerable moral and metaphysical need.
This form of intensification from individual feeling to universal
feeling is the basic form of Verhaeren's poem. It might be best, in
order to convey a clear idea of its form, to use a geometrical term and
say that these poems are, to a certain extent, _poems in the form of a
parabola._ While the lyric in the current sense mostly represents a
symmetrical and harmonious form, a return to itself, a circle,
Verhaeren's poem has the form of a parabola, apparently irregular but
really equally governed by a law. His poems soar in a swift sustained
flight, soar from the earth up into the clouds, from the real to the
unreal, and then from a sudden zenith fling themselves back to the
earth. The inspiration drives the feeling away from the pictorial, from
passionless contemplation to this utmost height of possibility, far away
from all sensuous perceptions high into the metaphysical, in order then,
suddenly and unexpectedly, to bring it back to the _terra firma_ of
reality. And indeed, in the music of these poems there is something as
of a darting upwards, something of the hissing and whizzing of a stone
well thrown and of its sudden falling down. In their rhythm too is this
increasing velocity, this catching of the breath and this return to the
starting-point, this bethinking itself of gravity when it returns to the
earth.
Something may now be said as to the means with which Verhaeren attains
his vision, with which he seeks to represent the inner passionateness of
things, with which he evokes enthusiasm. Let us first of all try to
establish whether Verhaeren is what is called a master of language.
Verhaeren's command of language is not by any means unlimited. Both in
his words and in his rhymes there is constant repetition which sometimes
borders on monotony; but on the other hand there is a strangeness, a
newness, an unexpectedness of wording which is almost unexampled in
French lyric poetry. An enrichment of the language, however, does not
proceed from neologisms alone; a word may become alive by the
unexpectedness of a new application, by a transposition of the meaning,
as Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, has often done in the German lyric.
To redeem 'die armen Worte, die im Alltag darben,'[2] and consecrate
them anew to poetry, is perhaps a higher merit than creating new words.
Now Verhaeren has above all, by the Flemish sense of language which he
inherited, imported a certain Belgian timbre into French lyric poetry.
Personally, it is true, he is almost ignorant of Flemish; nevertheless,
by the vague music familiar to him from his childhood's days, by a
certain guttural tone, he has imported a nuance which is perhaps less?
perceptible to the foreigner than to a Frenchman. At this point I should
like to call Maurice Gauchez as a witness and borrow the most salient
examples from his extraordinarily interesting monograph. Among the
neologisms for which Gauchez suggests a foreign origin he quotes the
following: les baisers rouges, les plumes majuscules, les malades
hiératiques, la statue textuelle, les automnes prismatiques, le soir
tourbillonaire, les solitudes océans, le ciel dédalien, le cœur
myriadaire de la foule, les automnes apostumes, les vents vermeils, les
navires cavalcadeurs, les gloires médusaires. And he rightly points out
how much certain of Verhaeren's verbs might enrich the French language:
enturquoiser, rauquer, vacarmer, béquiller, s'enténébrer, se futiliser,
se mesquiniser, larmer. But I for my part cannot look upon the
enrichment here accruing from racial instinct as the essential thing in
his verbal art: it only gives it a local colour, without really
explaining what is astonishingly modern in his diction. Verhaeren has
been a great creator of new things for the French lyric, above all by
his extension of its range of subjects, by his renewal of poetic
reality, by recruiting new forces for poetry in the domain of technical
science. _The great part of the new blood for his language came not so
much from Flemish as from science_. A man who writes poems on the
Exchange, on the theatre, on science, who sings factories and railway
stations, cannot ignore their terminology. He must borrow certain
technical expressions from the vocabulary of science, certain
pathological terms from medicine; he must extend the glossary of the
poetic by the extension of the poetic itself. There are geographical
surprises of rhyme to be found in Verhaeren: Berlin and Sakhalin,
Moscow, the Balearic and other distant islands whose names have never
previously lived in rhyme. And since science is by its own progress
compelled to invent new names every day, since new machines demand new
words for their necessities, here for the first time an inexhaustible
source has been discovered for replenishing the French language.
This immense wealth, on the other hand, is jeopardised by something that
might be called not so much poverty or restriction as fascination. Every
one-sidedness of feeling produces, with its advantages, certain defects,
and thus the constant passionateness which brought Verhaeren's poetry
near to oratory, to preaching, is at the same time responsible for a
certain monotony of the metaphors. Verhaeren is hallucinated by certain
words, images, adjectives, phrases. He repeats them incessantly through
all his work. All things in which a many-headed passion is united he
compares with a 'brasier'; 'carrefour' is his symbol for indecision;
'l'essor' is for him the last straining of effort; many cries and words
by which he hails his audience are repeated almost from page to page.
The adjectives too are often monotonous; often indeed, with the cold
'iques' at the end of them, they are schematic; and even in the
metaphors that phenomenon is unmistakable which in science is called
pseudoanæsthesia, that is, the memory of a fixed feeling from the domain
of some other sense is always individually associated with a certain
colour or sound. For him 'red' expresses all that is passionate; 'gold'
all greatness and pomp; 'white' all that is gentle; 'black' all enmity.
His images have thus something abrupt and absolute; there is always in
them, as Albert Mockel has demonstrated in his masterly study, the
decisive, the sudden excitement, which overwhelms our astonishment. His
images are as violent as his colours, as his rhythm. They have the
suddenness of a cannon-ball which darts through space and is only
perceptible to our vision when it reaches its aim and smashes the
target. Possibly the inmost reason of this lies in the fact that these
poems are intended to be spoken. A placard that is to have effect at
some distance must be in glaring colours; pathos calls for images that
hallucinate. Such images have indeed been found by Verhaeren, and by
Verhaeren only. He hardly seems to know nuances. With the brutal
instinct of a strong man he loves all that is glaring, all that is
untrammelled. 'La couleur, elle est dans ses œuvres une surprise de
métaux et d'images.'[3] But in this material they blaze, and with their
lightnings they light up even the most distant horizon. I will only
remind the reader of his 'beffrois immensément vêtus de nuit' or 'la
façade paraît pleurer des lettres d'or,' or his 'les gestes de lumière
des phares.' By the intensity of such images Verhaeren attains to quite
an incomparable clearness of the feeling. 'Personne, je crois, ne
possède à l'égal de Verhaeren le don des lumières et des ombres, non
point fondues, mais enchevêtrées, des noirs absolus coupés de blanches
clartés.'[4]
One-sidedness of temperament here produces a one-sided advantage with
all its artistic restrictions. So that Verhaeren is not a verbal artist
in the unrestricted sense of one who always hits upon the only, the
inevitable comparison for a thing; of one who flashes a bold word on the
attention once and never retails it till it palls, who seems to use
every word for the first time. His poetic vocabulary is rich, but by no
means infinite; his sensibility is strong, but it has its restrictions.
For, as is the case with every passionate poet, certain feelings at the
last white-heat of excitement appear to him identical, seem to him to be
capable of comparison only with the quite elementary things of Nature,
with fire, the sea, the wind, thunder and lightning. To make the point
clear, Verhaeren is not a verbal artist in Goethe's sense, but rather in
Schiller's sense. With the latter, too, he has the gift in common of
definitely expressing certain perceptions in one lyric line. He has
discovered essences of the lyric feeling of life, lines that are now
household words, or which at all events will be so. It will be
sufficient to mention word formations such as 'les villes
tentaculaires,' which in France have already become common-places, or
such maxims as 'La vie est à monter et non à descendre,' or 'Toute la
vie est dans l'essor.' In lines like these the lyric ecstasy is
compressed as in a coin, and perpetuated in the current riches of the
language.
This hardness and brutality, these abrupt transitions, constitute the
individuality of Verhaeren's poetry. At bottom it is nothing else than
an accentuated masculinity. The voice, the music, is guttural, deep,
raucous, masculine; the body of his poem has, like a man's body, the
beautiful movement of strength, but in repose gestures that are often
hard and which only in passion regain their compelling beauty. Whereas
French lyric poetry, so to speak, had imitated the female body, the
delicate grace of its soft yielding lines; whereas its first concern was
harmony; Verhaeren's poem strove only for the rhythm of movement, only
for the proud and vigorously ringing stride of a man, his leaping and
running, the fighting display of his strength. This is not the only
reason why the French have so long repudiated him. For where we delight
in an echo from the German in his language, they feel the harshness of
the Teutonic undertone; where we find a consonance with the German
ballad, a re-birth of the German ballad as though it were awakening from
the dreams of childhood, they see an opposition to the native tradition.
And in fact, the farther Verhaeren has proceeded in his development,
both in his personality and in his verse, the more the French varnish
has peeled off his Teutonic perception. It was only in the time of his
first dependence on tradition that his poetry was hardly to be
distinguished from that of other writers in French. The farther he
receded from the French standpoint, the more he unconsciously approached
German art. To-day, perhaps, a return to classicism is perceptible in
his poetry. The neologisms are not so audacious; the images are more
schematic; the whole poem is calmer and more clarified. This, however,
is by no means a cowardly compromise with a shattered tradition, no
repentant return to the fold; it is the same phenomenon we meet in a
similar manner in the late poems of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and
Swinburne; the effect of the cooling of the blood in age; the yielding
of sensuous perception to intellectual ideas. The victor has lost the
fighter's brutality; the man in his maturity no longer needs revolt but
a conception of the world--harmony. Here, as in Verhaeren's whole
evolution, his verse is the most delicately sensitive indicator of the
psychic revulsion, the perfect proof of a poetic and organic development
which is really inward and dependent only on the laws of his blood.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'L'Heure Mauvaise' (_Au Bord de la Route_).
[2] 'Poor words a-hungered in the working day.'--Rainer Maria Rilke,
_Mir sur Feier._
[3] Albert Mockel, _Émile Verhaeren_.
[4] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).
VERHAEREN'S DRAMA
Toute la vie est dans l'essor.
É.V., _Les Forces Tumultueuses._
Émile Verhaeren's dramas seem to stand outside his work. Verhaeren is
essentially a lyric poet. His whole feeling springs from lyric
enthusiasm, and all neighbouring domains are merely sources whose
strength flows into and feeds this one vital instinct. Verhaeren has
almost always used the dramatic and the epic only as a means, never as
an end in themselves: from the epic he has taken over into the vast
sweep of his dithyrambic poems its broad, calm development, and from the
drama the swift, abrupt contrast of transitions. The dramatic and the
epic only serve him as a tonic, as a means to strengthen the blood of
his lyric art. Although Verhaeren beside his lyric work has written
dramas--four up to the present--these, in the edifice of his complete
production, must be appreciated from a different point of view: from an
architectural point of view. For the dramas are to him, in a certain
sense, only a survey, a concentration of individual lyric crises, a
synopsis of certain ideal complexes which have occupied some moment of
his past; they are final settlements; the last point in lines of
development; milestones of individual epochs. All that in the lyric
poems, which never systematically bounded a domain, fell apart, is here
made to converge to the focus of a programme. The lyric juxtaposition is
fused into an inner relationship, the circle of ideas is co-ordinated
like a picture in the frame of a play. Verhaeren's four tragedies
represent four spheres of a conception of the universe: the religious,
the social, the national, and the ethical. _Le Cloître_ is a re-creation
of the book of verse _Les Moines_, is the tragedy of Catholicism; _Les
Aubes_ is a condensation of the sociological trilogy _Les Villes
Tentaculaires, Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires.
Philip II._ shapes the tragedy of the Antichrist, the contrast of Spain
and Belgium, of sensuality and asceticism. And _Hélène de Sparte_, which
in its outward form manifests a return to classicism, handles purely
moral, eternal problems. As far as their contents are concerned,
Verhaeren's dramas show no deviation, no change of the inner centre of
gravity, and his new dramatic style is in perfect harmony with his new
lyric style. For just as on the one hand he has used the dramatic
element as a substance of his lyric work, here in his dramas he has
transmuted the lyric element to a dramatic element. Here, too, we have
nothing but visions intensified into exaltation. Here, as everywhere
else, Verhaeren can only create by enthusiasm. What goads him on is the
lyric moment in his enthusiasm, that second of the highest tension when
passion, if it is not to shatter the frame of its generator, must have
explosive words. The characters of his dramas are never anything but
symbols of great passions, the bridge for this ascension of the
exaltation. To him the action is no more than the way to the crises, to
those seconds when some mighty force seizes on these characters and
forces them to cry out. Whole scenes seem to be only awaiting for the
moment when some one shall rise and turn to the crowd, wrestle with it
and overthrow it, or be himself dashed to pieces.
The style of Verhaeren's dramas is purely lyrical; the pace is
throughout passionate and feverish; and this method, which runs counter
to all dramatic canons, was bound organically to create a new technique.
The French drama had hitherto known only the rhymed Alexandrine or
prose. In Verhaeren's dramas--for the first time to my knowledge--prose
and verse (verse which is 'free' both as regards rhythm and rhyme) are
throughout promiscuously mixed. Mixed, but not as in Shakespeare, in
whose plays verse and prose alternate in individual scenes and
establish, so to speak, a social stratification, serving-men speaking in
prose and their masters in verse: in Verhaeren the prose passages are
the broad, resting foundations of the action; the curved bowls, so to
speak, from which the holy fire of the exaltation flames. His
characters express their calm in prose, pass from calm to excitement,
and in this intensification speak a language which imperceptibly merges
into a poem. Not till their passion breaks out do they speak in verse,
in those seconds, as it were, when their soul begins to vibrate; and in
these passages one cannot help thinking of an aeroplane which is first
driven along the ground and moves with ever greater speed till suddenly
it soars aloft. In Verhaeren's drama the characters speak an ever purer
language the more poetical they become; music breaks with their passion
from their souls; just as many people who behave coarsely and awkwardly
in ordinary life, in great moments suddenly achieve a bearing of heroic
beauty. This embodies the idea that in enthusiasm a man discovers in
himself another and a purer language; that passion and the yearning to
free oneself from an immeasurable and intolerable earthly burden make a
poet of any man. This idea is in harmony with Verhaeren's whole
conception of the universe, his idea that the man swept away by passion
and enthusiasm is on a higher plane than the critic with his lack of hot
feeling; that receptivity for great sensations constitutes, so to speak,
a scale of moral values. And the stage performances have shown that this
new style is justified, that the transition from prose to verse,
occurring as it does contemporaneously with the ascension from calm to
passion, passes practically unnoticed by the audience, which is
equivalent to saying that when put to the test the method was recognised
as necessary.
And it is by passion, this innermost flame of Verhaeren's poetry, that
his dramas live too. Their qualities are those of the lyrics; they have,
above all, that vast power of vision which sets _Philip II_. against the
tragic landscape of Spain; over the drama of Helen arches the heaven of
Greece, blue, and mild, and open like a flower; and behind the tragedy
of modern cities unrolls the inflamed scenery of the sky with the black
arms of chimneys. And then the immense fervour of the ecstasy which, not
in a slow, regular progression, but in savage, convulsive thrusts,
whirls the action onward to the moments of the solution.
Thus Verhaeren's first drama derives its strength from the lyric source
of a man's accusation of himself. _Le Cloître_ is a paraphrase of _Les
Moines_, the book of the monks. Here again all the characters are
gathered together in the cool corridors of a monastery--the gentle, the
wild, the feudal, the wrathful, the childlike, the learned monk; here,
however, they do not act in isolation, but with all their strength the
one against the other. They fight for the prior's chair, which is really
the symbol of something higher. For just as in _Les Moines_ every
individual monk expressed symbolically some virtue of Catholicism and a
distinct idea of God, here the prior's chair decides the question who is
the most deserving of God. For his successor the old prior has
designated Balthasar, a nobleman whom the monastery has sheltered for
years. But he had only taken refuge there because he had killed his own
father, thus escaping secular justice, and now he feels the
consciousness of his guilt burning, feels the exasperated struggle
between his own conscience and the lighter conscience of the others, who
have long since forgiven him. And he cannot feel himself free before he
has made his confession before the assembled monks, and even then only
when he has repeated the confession, against the will of the monastery,
to the people, and surrendered himself to the secular judges. The Roman
Catholic idea of confession is here wonderfully in agreement with
Dostoieffsky's conception of salvation by confession, of deliverance by
suffering self-imposed. In three climaxes of equal force at the end of
each of the three acts the tragic confession bursts into flame--first
born of fear, then of a sense of justice, and at the last positively
conceived as a pleasure; and here in these superb lyric ecstasies rest
the strong pinions which bear the tragedy.
In the second, the social tragedy _Les Aubes,_ the scenario is the
present time. It has the purple scenery of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_,
of the cities with the arms of polypi, which drain the blood of the poor
dying country. Beggars, paupers, those who are starving, those who have
been evicted, march to Oppidomagnum, the modern industrial city, and
besiege it. It is the past once again storming the future. In the
lyrical trilogy this struggle had been shaped in a hundred visionary
instances; here, however, the bright sky of reconciliation is arched
above the battle-field, over the realities hovers the dream. For here
the future joins hands with the present. The great tribune, Hérénien,
breaks the backbone of this battle and shows himself the hero of a new
morality by secretly admitting the enemy into the city--in the old sense
the action of a traitor--by yielding and thus transforming the struggle
into a reconciliation. He is the tragic bearer of the moral idea that
enmity may be overcome by goodness, and he falls as the first martyr of
his faith. Verhaeren's social conception, his superb description of
realities, here merge slowly in a Utopia; the dawns of the new days
begin to shine above the pasts that are dead; the din of rebellion fades
away in harmony. This drama, like the others, is far remote from the
possibilities of the majority of theatres, because of the fact that here
too an ethical idea is expressed with all the glow and ecstasy which as
a rule in modern dramas is only found in the utterance of erotic desire.
The third tragedy, _Philip II_., is a national drama, although its scene
is not laid in Flanders. Much as Charles de Coster in his _Thyl
Ulenspiegel_ had, with a Fleming's deadly hatred, seen in Philip II. the
hereditary enemy of liberty, Verhaeren, who with the lyric poetry of
his _Toute la Flandre_ became the representative singer of his native
land, painted this gloomy figure with hatred. Philip II. is here, as in
_Thyl Ulenspiegel,_ the hard, inflexible king who would fain put life
out because it burns too red for him, who wishes to have the world as
cool and marble-like as the chambers of the Escorial. Here of a sudden
the reverse side of Roman Catholicism, whose passion was immortalised in
_Le Cloître_, is rent open; its pitilessness and asceticism; its
obstinate effort to overthrow the irrefragable joy of life. Don Carlos,
however, is the fervent friend of the people, the friend of Flanders; he
is the will to enjoyment, to merry moods, to passion. And this struggle
between the 'yes' and the 'no' of life, this fight of Verhaeren's own
lyric crisis, this fight between the denial and the passionate approval
of enjoyment--at bottom, toe, the deepest cause of the war between Spain
and the Netherlands--is here symbolised in characters. Of course, any
comparison with Schiller's _Don Carlos_ must tell against Verhaeren, for
the German drama is far more dramatic and conceived on a scale of
greater magnificence; but Verhaeren did not aim at a complete rounding
off, at a plenitude of characters; all that he wanted was to show these
two feelings in their struggle with each other, the enthusiasm of life
and its suppression by force. A comparison with Schiller's drama best
shows Verhaeren's disregard of dramatic canons, and at the same time
the immense new lyric power of the play. For Spain is here seen with a
strength and intensity of vision which is probably without a parallel in
tragedy. The cold, hypocritical atmosphere can be felt; and better than
from words the character of Philip can be perceived in that one silent
scene in which he suddenly appears stealthily creeping to watch his son
in the arms of the countess, and then, without a gleam in his rigid
eyes, without the slightest movement of anger, vanishes again into the
dark. Behind him, however, behind the spy and the eavesdropper, glides
another shadow, the monk of the Inquisition: the eavesdropper is himself
shadowed, the ruler is himself ruled. Visions like these, with the
ecstasy of certain scenes, are the strongest motive power in Verhaeren's
poetic construction. His dramatic art, like the art of his lyrics, does
not rise in a steady ascent, but in sudden wild leaps and starts.
Only in his last drama, _Hélène de Sparte_, has Verhaeren come nearer to
the accepted conception of the dramatic. That is characteristic of his
organic development. For now that he is in the years when passion of
necessity cools, harmony grows dear to him; and he who through all the
years of his youth and prime was a revolutionary, now recognises the
necessity of inner laws. By its mere intellectual substance this tragedy
expresses the veering round: it is nothing else than the longing from
passion to harmony, Helen's flight from adventures to repose. And the
return is to be found again in the verse, for Verhaeren here for the
first time takes up the traditional French metre; his form, though yet
free, approaches the Alexandrine. The tragedy of Helen is the tragedy of
beauty. Helen is one of those antique characters who in Greek literature
were only sketched in fleeting lines, characters whom a modern poet is
now entitled to fill in with his own fate. For from the Greek sources we
really knew nothing about her personal fate; we only knew the effect she
exercised, only the reflection of her personality on others, not that of
others on her. She was the queen who inflamed all men; who was the cause
of great wars; the woman for whose sake murder on murder was committed;
who was snatched from one bed to another; for love of whom Achilles
arose from the dead; who passed her life circled by disastrous passion.
But whether she herself shared these passions, whether she grew by them
or suffered by them, the poets tell us nothing. Verhaeren in his drama
has now attempted to depict the tragedy of the woman who endures fearful
suffering because she is always desired in lust and no more; who is
consumed by the torture of being ever robbed from lover by lover; of
never knowing the look of pure eyes, calm converse, quiet breathing; who
is cursed always to stand at the pyre of passion, with the flames of
men always blazing round her. Whoever looks at her at once desires her,
snatches her; none waits and asks whether he serves her will; she is
robbed like a chattel; she glides from hand to hand. In Verhaeren's
drama Helen has returned home, a woman tired, tired of all unrest, of
all her triumphs, tired of love; a woman hating her own beauty because
it creates unrest, longing for nothing but old age, when none shall
desire her more and her days shall be calm. Menelaus has brought her
home, rescued her from all that stifling steam of criminal passion; now
she would breathe quietly, live calm days, and be faithful to him. She
desires no more than this. No passion can tempt her more. 'I have seen
the flaring of so many flames that now I love only the hearth's glow and
the lamp' is the expression of her poignant resignation. But fate will
not yet let her go. Verhaeren has here seized on the great idea of the
Greeks that everything that is superhuman on earth, every excessive
gift, even that of beauty, is pursued as a hybrid by the envy of the
gods, and must be paid for with pain. Too great beauty is no profit, but
a tragic gift. And hardly has Helen returned, to rest and be happy, to
be like everybody else, than new clouds roll themselves up above her
head. Her own brother desires her; her enemy Electra desires her; her
husband is murdered for her sake; and the old fearful battle threatens
to break out anew for the possession of her body. Now she flees, away
from men, out into nature. And here again, with the vision of genius,
Verhaeren approaches Greek feeling. The forest is not dead to him, but
animate; life does not stop at human beings; fauns emerge from the
bushes, naiads from the rivers, bacchantes from the mountains, and all
swarm round Helen in her despair, luring her to their lust, till she
flees to Zeus in death.
It is characteristic of Verhaeren that he has made even this tragedy,
the tragedy of Helen, anerotic, or better anti-erotic. Perhaps the
slight interest which has hitherto been manifested in Verhaeren's
dramas, and indeed partly in his whole work, may be ascribed to the fact
that, in comparison with the other poets of his day, he has held himself
aloof from erotic subjects, that the problem of love has only recently,
in the years of his maturity, begun to interest him as a theme for his
art. From the first Verhaeren concentrated all the passion which others
lavished on the erotic in purely intellectual things, in enthusiasm, in
admiration. In his dramas woman plays an almost subordinate rôle, and
_Le Cloître_ is perhaps the only important drama of our days which does
not show a single woman among its characters and in its inner circle of
problems. By this fact alone his dramatic aim strays too far from the
interests of our public. For it is from a purely intellectual conflict
that Verhaeren seeks to disengage that height and heat of passion which
hitherto was known only in erotic themes; and therefore the exaltation
strikes the majority of an audience as strange, and leaves them unmoved.
All our contemporaries who seek art only in the theatre are too
indifferent and timid to be snatched up, for a purely ethical problem,
into an ecstasy so burning, so persistently lit with convulsive
lightnings. This is the only explanation I can find for the opposition
to Verhaeren's dramas, which are so full of beauty and of living,
dramatic, passionate situations, and which, above all, contain something
new, a new dramatic style. This very kindling of prose to verse was a
revelation. But the whole dramatic aim is different in Verhaeren to that
which obtains on the stage of to-day. His aim is not to excite interest,
not to produce fear and compassion, but enthusiasm. He does not wish to
occupy the minds of his audience, but to carry them away into his
rhythm. He wishes to make them drunk with his great excitement, because
only he who gazes in enthusiasm is capable of recognising these supreme
passions; he wishes to make the spectators as feverish as the characters
they see before them on the stage; he wishes to make their blood fiery;
wishes to raise them above all cool, calm, and critical contemplation.
His whole temperament, which drives along in the direction of
superabundance; his art, which only fulfils its purpose in ecstasy;
require impassioned actors and an impassioned audience. To create the
ideal atmosphere which Verhaeren demands for his dramas would require an
actor of kindred genius who should have no fear of being called
emotional, and who would hurl the verses down like cataracts,
emphasising like a demagogue and at the same time unfolding all the
magnificence of the rhythm. For the poet asks for nothing save a feeling
of enthusiasm corresponding to that which first created the poem in him.
His intention is not to convince by logic, not to dazzle by pictures,
but to whip up and carry along with him into that ultimate dizzy feeling
which to him is alone identical with the highest form of the feeling of
life--into passion.
In Germany _Le Cloître_,[1] as staged by Max Reinhardt, and again in the
Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, has conquered the interest of a
literary public and triumphed unreservedly over the obstacle of its own
strangeness. There has been an exemplary production of _Philip II._ in
the Munich Künstlertheater; _Hélène de Sparte_ on the other hand has not
yet found the setting it demands. As bodied forth in Paris by Ida
Rubinstein, with decorations of a grandiose barbarism by Bakst, with a
ground-colouring of music, it was effective more by the external
magnificence of this somewhat sensationally advertised _mise en scène_
than by its poetic qualities, smothered as they were by the
accessories. A production which shall do justice to the play, leaving
its pure lyric line unbedizened with glaring arabesques, is still
waiting as a task for some actor-manager of genius who possesses that
highest and rarest quality of being able to subordinate himself to the
utterance, who is anxious not to ruin a noble simplicity by a spurious
plenitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A version of _Le Cloître_, by Mr. Osman Edwards, was successfully
produced by Miss Horniman at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1910.